Challenging Inequality – An Introduction to Forum Theatre

Let’s imagine that you are going to a Café with friends after work, college. The waiter approaches your table and asks one of your friends to leave because the Café does not serve women in short skirts. How do you react? How do others react? Should you leave? Should you fight back? What should be done?

We all have faced similar issues in daily-life interactions with others. How do we go about them? How should we?

Forum Theater is an opportunity for all of us to STOP the unjust scene (like the one described above).
To think, discuss and find alternative solutions. It is an opportunity to carry out our best as a spect-actor not a spectator to the situation; an opportunity to make dialogue and progress.

|| Forum Theatre ||

Forum Theater is one of the forms and techniques used in Theater of the Oppressed. Forum Theater provides participants a platform to practice and find a new language to create dialogue and react to social issues. In this form of theater, there is a forum for all to explore, create and perform new ways of analyzing problems and, through theater, find collective solutions. This helps individuals and communities to practice listening, and looking at unjust situations – situations that each of us has faced/witnessed or might face/witness in the future, in order to prepare for the best possible reaction.

Key focuses of Forum Theatre:
> Utilising theater as a tool to explore crucial real-life situations and try to change (if needed) how we react to them
> Connecting inside emotions to the outside world through theatre games.

Note:
> Participants should come in comfortable clothes
> Participants must carry with them a small item with a personal story behind it

|| Facilitator ||

For Gita Es, the theater has always been a passion. It helps her feel free, expressive, emotionally and physically creative, and completely herself. Gita always wanted to connect her concern for freedom, justice, and equality to a form of theater. Although she worked with the UN and a few international NGOs, she continued to look for something else; something more interactive, effective and inclusive.

Since 2005 Gita has conducted Creative Theatre classes for street/working children in Iran and Afghanistan, as well as a Storytelling for Social Justice project for undocumented children in Iran. In 2011, she learned about Theater of the Oppressed and in collaboration with other social activists and artists she practiced Forum Theater (on domestic violence) and performed with refugee women victims of violence living in Iran, back then. This was a turning point for her and the most realistic situation, where she watched participants approaching performance as a means to try and change what they believed was wrong.

She then participated in Theater for Living training workshop in Germany and India (Conducted by David Diamond) to expand her knowledge and practice. She continued in this field by conducting Introduction to Forum Theater workshops for women activists in Nepal on the topic of violence against women, to introduce new dimensions in analyzing the issue and to practice methods of engaging communities.

Right now she is facilitating sessions on Challenging Inequality; Forum Theatre for teenagers at Poorna Learning Center in Bangalore in order to practice alternative ways of looking at social issues. And conducting Creative Theater sessions at Skylight World NGO in Bangalore for kids.